Without
question, the French priest and archeologist, Abbe Henri Breuil is the
dominant figure in the history of cave art interpretation. He became interested
in the art of the caves in 1900, at the age of 23, and only one year later had
already discovered two previously unknown sites. Appointed professor of
archeology at the College de France in 1929, he was notified immediately when
the cave at Laucaux was discovered in 1940, and soon became the world's foremost
authority concerning it. For 61 years, he studied painted caves all over the
world, spending, by his own calculation, a net total of seven years in field
work underground. In 1952, he published the extraordinary 400 Years of Cave
Art, a definitive and beautifully illustrated treatment of the art of 92
caves.

Considering
Breuil's dominant position in the field until his death in 1961, it is not
surprising that his general interpretation of the meaning of cave art was widely
adopted by experts and lay people alike. Breuil argued that the origin of the
paintings lay in the masking practices of a people that depended for their
survival on hunting big game. He imagined Paleolithic hunters donning masks and
covering themselves in pelts of the animals they hunted in order to attract
their prey. When spread out in a two-dimensional plane, the masks and pelts
became flat images that could be painted or engraved on cave walls. Influenced
by anthropological studies of the aboriginal Arunta people of Central Australia,
Breuil claimed that the Paleolithic rock paintings, like those of the Arunta,
were created in ceremonies intended to multiply game animals, as well as to
ensure successful kills by means of magical images of slaughtered prey. Both
categories of cave paintings were examples of what the 19th century
anthropologist James Frazer called "sympathetic magic." Sympathetic magic
operates by the principle of similarity. What is done to the properly made image
of an object is done to that object itself, as when a sorcerer sticks pins in a
doll resembling his victim in an effort to destroy him. By making images of
animals penetrated by spears, the cave hunters were attempting to kill the
animals the images resembled, or, more precisely, to render the game susceptible
to being killing by hunting parties. Similarly, in creating multiple images of animals, the
artists were attempting to increase the fertility of the migrating herds. It is
true that a considerable degree of professionalism is evident in the cave
paintings. The people who decorated the ancient rock galleries discovered
techniques of mixing paint and applying it, of representing volume through
shading, or suggesting movement or emotional content, and so on, techniques they
shared with their colleagues and passed down to their successors. In short, they
were the beneficiaries and creators of sophisticated artist traditions. Yet in
spite of the high degree of aesthetic accomplishment many of the paintings and
engravings exhibit, they are not examples of art for art's sake. In the view of Abbe Breuil, they are attempts to ensure survival by means of magic under
the difficult circumstances of the Ice Age.

Since his death,
Breuil's theory has been criticized on two grounds. First of all, most of the
animals depicted on the cave walls appeared rather infrequently on the hunters'
menu, judging by the bones that have been found in garbage heaps in some of the
caves. Even though that criticism continues to appear in scholarly publications,
Breuil had already anticipated it and responded in advance in the introduction
to his masterpiece, 400 Years of Cave Art. He argues there that magic was
most likely to be employed on game that was relatively scarce. After all, there
was little need to perform ceremonies and leave images in the dangerous
depths of caves to ensure hunting success with a species of game that was
already abundant. It's true that some of the images depict animals that never
appear in the hunters' diet, felines, bears, rhinos, and so on. But these were
predators or otherwise dangerous animals that the hunting communities had every
reason to control through magical means.

A second
criticism, one much more difficult to answer, concerns the validity of the
ethnographic comparison that backs up Breuil's theory. Even if the historically
recorded Arunta people resembled the Paleolithic Europeans in that both hunted
game in small communal bands with only stone age spears or blow guns, why should
we assume that their cave art had the same meaning and purpose as the
Paleolithic paintings? After all, the Arunta people survived for thousands of
years after the Paleolithic hunters had disappeared. Isn't it likely that their
cultural traditions diverged considerably from those responsible for
the ancient European cave art?

In order to
secure his argument, and thus the magical interpretation of Paleolithic
painting and engraving, Abbe Breuil would need to supply supporting evidence
that reaches deeper than the fact that some contemporary indigenous peoples have
created images on cave walls for such purposes.
The South African archeologist, David Lewis-Williams has attempted to provide
such evidence more than three decades after Abbe Breuil's death.